TheVille

so what do you think? good? bad? suggestions for possible changes is appreciated...searching through all the different brands & types seems to get repetitive, so im not sure if any of this is worth it.
(im most definitely not a hardware expert)

i already have a mid-tower case with 2 80mms fans installed and room for 2 more, should i fill them?

also, i get completely lost when it comes to what to buy as far as heatsinks and/or fans for the individual pieces(video, cpu, mem), so any suggestions on that would be great as well!(according to specs, some of the above come with them, but are they sufficient?)

anything else missing?

It's got a lot of the same specs as mine does. The only comment I'm going to make is that if you're intending to store a lot of video/audio on your comp, then 500GB may not cut it. I've got approx. 1TB of space on my comp, and now that I've archived all my DVD video onto it, I'm almost full.

people on several hardware boards i lurk on swear by the GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L if you aren't planning on using sli. It's also 60 dollars cheaper than your current motherboard selection.

Also extra vent fans sure can't hurt (unless you point them the wrong way...).

For the heatsink, look for the Thermalright IFX-14... its giant but damn it works good, it may not fit your case... ask Clay about that one. Otherwise a Zalman 9500 or 9700 will do fine... i just got all them number right by memory... i think i need a break from computing...(im tryin)

I would take Clay's advice on that mobo as well, you dont need the extra PCI-e slots if you aren gunna use em.

Aside from that, this may be unrelated to how good the P5K is, but at the computer store i used to work at, they have like 10 P5K's clearanced that people returned....(sent em back the ASUS, were check good, and sent back) my best take on that, its not the easiest motherboard to build off of, may run into problems that will piss you off and make you want to return it because you think it doesnt work.

cool, thanks for the replies...i think i'll go with most of them and hopefully be up and running in no time!

If you plan on overclocking your 6600, I would recommend a motherboard based on the X35 chipset. It will give you much better overclocking capabilities, even with the beast the 6600 is.

Also as for heatsink goes I definitely recommend the zalman 9500 (smaller cheaper) or the 9700. I have the 9700 cooling my 125W processor and it never climbs above 50C.